CEO Blogs: 5 Reasons CEOs Shouldn't Blog

There are plenty of reasons CEOs or other executives shouldn't blog, and many of them certainly shouldn't.

I'll go as far as to say that many organizations do NOT need to blog. Sure, they could, and they might benefit from it, but please let's not have any of that rhetoric that all companies must start blogging soon or they'll go the way of the dodo -- extinct. Simply not true -- although MANY organizations can benefit from blogging.

Here are 5 commonly given reasons CEOs and other executives shouldn't blog. I don't buy reason #3 or #4 as I note, but they are commonly mentioned and worth addressing.

1) CEOs are risk adverse. Much of their daily lives are occupied with risk management. They have got enough to worry about without this new-fangled blogging thing.

2) The qualifications that make one a good CEO or executive and that make one a good blogger do not overlap remotely near 100%. Even among those who communicate well, many have difficulty writing in a personal and informal tone as blogging requires.

I had one CEO I coached literally hold a telephone to his head and pretend he was talking to an old friend in order to get conversational language out of his mouth! We even tried having him leave voice mail in this fashion to his secretary who would then transcribe it into a draft blog post. It took a few weeks, but I finally got him writing conversationally, but not without a lot of difficulty.

3) CEOs have confidential information that can't be made public.

This is an often cited reason, but rarely holds water. Someone that makes it that high in the corporate ladder had already better know what they can publicly discuss and what they can't.

Hey, let's be serious -- most executives are very smart people and let's give them the credit of at least common sense!

4) They may need to stop for legal reasons.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market stopped blogging because of an "independent internal investigation."
If a company is going public, there is an SEC enforced "quite period" which may disrupt blogging by executives.

This is silly. When is "you maybe needed to stop someday" a good reason to never start? I guess I'd better never go to that Chinese Buffet because I'll need to stop eating sometime. Doesn't make sense to me!

5) Time -- or lack of it. I have no extra time, neither do you, and neither do CEOs and other execs.

One solution is a multi-author blog where several executives occasionally contribute, or perhaps a CEO and a few other people do. This generates enough content to build regular readers, and is often a great solution. Another possibility, one that makes many bloggers cringe, is the possibility of "Ghost Blogging," which we'll address later!

 

Many CEOs and other executives should blog, but there are also plenty of good reasons why some of them should not.